Bobbie Lynn's Blog

I was given free access to a review copy of this set of videos a while ago, but I held off on actually reviewing it because it seemed very likely that they hadn’t quite posted the entire thing yet. The rest has been added now, so I can go ahead and talk about it without worrying about it being incomplete!

Bash is both probably the most popular shell for most Linux and Unix and similar systems, and also a scripting language that’s used with the shell. This set of videos focuses on the scripting part by taking you through all of the major topics that you need to write a Bash script.

You’ll have a much easier time of it if you already have some comfort with the basic principles of working on the command line. He touches very briefly on what regular shell commands do as they come up, but command line novices aren’t the target audience here and will probably be overwhelmed by how much information they would need to absorb.

The nice thing about these videos is that you’re hearing his explanations of why he’s doing everything as it happens along with the chance to see all of the interaction that’s happening with the shell and how it responds at each step. There are good written tutorials of Bash out there for free, so watching these definitely isn’t necessary for learning shell scripting. Still, if your learning style leans more toward the auditory and visual, Great Bash will be a great resource in making the topic understandable.

There’s a lot that’s interesting about the early days of Google from both business and technology perspectives, but what grabbed me about this interview with an early Google employee is that when he’s asked about Google’s issues with privacy objections, he reframes it as a problem of rationality:

Google doesn’t have enough irrational people working there, and the rest of the world doesn’t have enough rational people occupying it.

The point that he comes around to is that, even if it isn’t strictly factually accurate that having Google automatically scan your email for keywords in order to choose the advertising it shows, people still feel like their privacy has been invaded. The unusually rational bunch of people who control a lot of the decision making at Google have difficulty grasping the fact that perception might as well be reality when it comes to how people react on an issue like this, and so they get themselves into trouble.

My mind went straight back to that article when I saw this claim today that half of the people who’ve used government social programs think they haven’t. There are some statistics about how many people who have benefited from different types of programs still think they’ve never gotten any social program benefits, but that’s not really the main thing that interested me here.

In the comments, you can see that people get into debating details like what constitutes a social program and what counts as getting benefits. Some of them actually are a little arguable, but the most interesting part to me is the stark line that people try to draw between the idea of the government sending you money and the government not taking the money to begin with (e.g. tax credits).

In the strictly mathematical and rational sense, whether I give someone $5 with an agreement that they were discounting it from $10 or I give them $10 and get $5 back afterward, we’re in effectively the same situation. The emotional nature of the exchange is very different in those two cases, though.

I’ve been busy for the past couple of months and not commenting on much, but I’m very curious what we’re going to be looking at as Google+ evolves.

Facebook may be losing popularity in some areas without any help from Google. Meanwhile, people are apparently trying to sell the opportunity to access Google+ via eBay.

It may very well go this way, at least in some circles.

I’m not saying that it’s a meaningful comparison that Facebook is losing users for its free service while there’s a sort of black market developing for access to Google’s, but I bet there are some comedians out there who are playing this situation for humor value.

It looks like they’ve been working on this for a while, so it seems like they just got very lucky that they happened to hit their launch at a time when Facebook is already showing some weakness. If the service turns out to be as good as some reviews are saying, there could be a lot of entertainment value coming up in watching how Facebook reacts.

I went out to participate in the untimed adult portion of the Race for the Cure today. My mother decided that she wanted me to go with her, and since she paid the registration I went along with it.

Considering the size of the event, it’s amazing that they manage to pull off the logistics. Bringing that many people into a city all at about the same time and arranging to have them park and get themselves to the right places so that they can do their various parts of the event must take a lot of work and a serious sense of organization.

If I ever go there again, I think I may have to try the timed run.

The book 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know is basically a collection of essays by a variety of skilled programmers who are each offering their personal view on the topic of what all programmers should know.

As you’d expect from such a large collection of authors, the value of the result is mixed. Some of the essays will probably be arguing for ideas that you hadn’t really considered, while others are probably things that every remotely competent programmer already knows (at least in theory!).

In a weird way, it’s actually the latter case where the book might actually be most beneficial. Some of the ideas offered are obvious, but easily forgotten. For example, the focus of chapter 3 is “Ask, “What Would the User Do?” (You Are Not the User)”. While almost anyone who’s ever written a program would probably agree that the goal of a program is to be intuitive and easy for the users, I think we’ve all had the dubious pleasure of using programs where it seems as if the user was given no thought at all. Even if this kind of idea isn’t at all new to you, it doesn’t exactly hurt to be reminded of it.

The essays in the book are licensed under the creative commons, and available through a website run by O’Reilly, so you can take a look at a few essays if you like to get a sense of whether it would be of value to you or not personally. I actually worked from an electronic copy that O’Reilly provided for review purposes, but I had looked over some of the essays on the website beforehand.